College

There are five airplanes ready to depart. Runway A and Runway D are available. How many ways can two planes be assigned to these runways without using the same runway?

Answer :

There are 2 different ways to assign two planes to two available runways without using the same runway for both planes, calculated by considering the number of possibilities for each plane.

The question addresses a scenario in which there are five airplanes and two available runways, asking how many ways two planes can be assigned to runways without using the same runway for both planes. This is a problem of combinatorics, a subset of mathematics. To solve this, note that we have two distinct runways, A and B, and we want to assign two out of the five airplanes to these runways.

The first plane has a choice of two runways, so there are 2 possibilities for the first plane. The second plane can only use the remaining runway, which means there is only 1 possibility for the second plane. Since we are looking for the number of ways two planes can be assigned to two different runways, we multiply the possibilities for each plane together.

So, the total number of ways two planes can be assigned to two runways without overlap is 2 possibilities for the first plane x 1 possibility for the second plane, which equals 2 different arrangements.